If I had to express the
Buddhist teaching with one single word it would be
"suffering".

Shakyamuni decided to leave home and
become a monk after encountering the four sufferings of
birth, ageing, sickness and death. He then awakened to the
truth of suffering and taught it thruoghtout his lifetime.
His teaching starts with the noble truth of suffering, and it
is said that he repeatedly confirmed his deciples
understanding of the four noble truths (suffering,
attachment, the extinction of attachment and the eightfold
path) during the last moments of his life, and then gladly
let go of his body, which he called the source of
suffering.

First, what are the four noble truths?
The first noble truth is "dukkha", which is translated
as "suffering", but actually means the un-satisfactoriness of
everything: Wherever we go, what ever we do, we will never be
100% satisfied. One part of us can never get
"satisfaction". Next, there is "attachment". The reason
why we are never satisfied is that we think we have to be
satisfied in the fist place. If we could let this thought go
- stop trying to be satisfied - we would realize that life is
not that unsatisfactory after all. This leads to the
third noble truth, the "extinction of attachment". If we stop
craving for satisfaction, we naturally stop being "not
satisfied". But - fourth truth - this must be no
theoretical understanding, but has to be put into practice in
our daily life. This daily life of letting go our deep rooted
thought: "I want satisfaction" - is what is called walking
the Buddhist path.

There is a big trap here,
though: "If I practice Buddhism and stop thinking of wanting
to be satisfied, I will be liberated from my suffering, and
every day of my life will be happy."This seems to be a
logical conclusion of the above. We suffer, because we want
to be satisfied. We will only be really satisfied, if we stop
trying to be satisfied.

But: If we "try to" let go of
thinking that we want to be satisfied, just to be really
satisfied, we are not really letting go. We are just getting
even more attached. Because "letting go" does not mean that
we are "letting go to be satisfied". It is this thought that
"we really want to be satisfied", that we have to let go
of.

This is why I said in the beginning that
Buddhism means "suffering". In Buddhism, "liberation"
does not mean that we are liberated "from" suffering. Rather,
we approach and accept suffering completely, becoming one
with it. Thus we embrace suffering, and suffering embraces
us. This is what is meant by letting go of the thought of
wanting to be satisfied.

If we let go in this way and become
one with suffering, the "I" that thinks that it suffers will
disappear, just as that what appears to make "us" suffering.
The only reality is that of un-satisfactoriness, the reality of this life here and now,
which is independent from our thoughts and desires.